Irving's classic gets a spin by Rose of Athens Theatre

Posted: Monday, October 08, 2007

Imagine poor Ichabod's dismay: new in town, just blown it with the girl of his dreams, riding home in the spooky woods after an evening of ghost stories, and then, right behind him, he can hear the dreaded noise everyone's warned him about ... Clip clop ... Clip clop.

Washington Irving's creepy (and funny) classic, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," was first published in 1820. These days, the name might bring to mind the 1949 Disney short (Ichabod and his enormous Adam's apple spend Halloween night on the run from the Headless Horseman) or Tim Burton's 1999 adaptation (a gorier version with a more handsome Ichabod, played by Johnny Depp).

Now, with Halloween right around the corner, the Headless Horseman - "huge, misshapen, black and towering," writes Irving, a creature that "seemed gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster ready to spring upon the traveler" - will clip clop his way into Athens.

Rose of Athens Theatre, the only professional and nonprofit theater company in town, opens its 2007-2008 season with "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," presented this weekend and Oct. 18-21.

If your working knowledge of the story comes from either the cartoon or the movie, this production "is more like the cartoon, which is more like Washington Irving's tale," says Lisa Cesnik Ferguson, Rose of Athens' artistic director. "Spooky and goofy, with all of the actors playing multiple parts."

Lisa Mende might be the best known member of the troupe, with her appearances in television ("Seinfeld," "Sex and the City") and film ("Hollywood Shuffle," "Scrooged"), but all members are professional actors. In this production, Allen Rowell is Ichabod and Ben Reed is his romantic rival, Brom Van Brunt. Maria Moody is their shared love interest, Katrina Van Tassel, with whom Ichabod has not a chance. After all, writes Irving in a musing suitable for the time, her mere gender "causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together."

Mende and Joelle Re Arp Dunham round out the cast, literally, as the five cast members juggle around 20 roles, says Ferguson.

The show features live music composed especially for the production by local musician Christopher Henderson. Even with a "harvest hoe-down" and a church choir scene, the production isn't a traditional musical, Ferguson explains.

"The musicians for Rose of Athens Theatre compose music that serves the production, very much like a movie score," she says. "I love musical theater, but that's not really our niche. That's already covered; there are people here who do that wonderfully. We want to make really ridiculously entertaining theater that happens to have music in it created by people who live here."

Ferguson, who has traveled the country performing, directing and producing theater, remembers being spurred to create Rose of Athens in January of 2006.

"I sat down and did some soul searching, and decided I had to stop asking who was going to start a professional theater company in Athens," she says. "I realized that the answer to that question was me."

The company spent their first season performing in different venues, including Jittery Joe's Roasting Company, the Morton Theatre and area schools, presenting both the quirky - "The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged)" - and classic - Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The theater's mission statement, says Ferguson, focuses on showing a diversity of voices that reaches to all members of the community.

"I'm so excited that we have a professional theater right here where we live," she says. "What we're creating is a new model."

As for "Sleepy Hollow," Ferguson reassures that the show is appropriate for all ages.

"The great thing about theater is that a lot of the scary things are going to be in your imagination," she says.